


like odysseus at the prow of his ship

by philthestone



Series: nursery 'verse [14]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: New Republic Era - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anyways, F/M, Gen, listen i love mara i've missed her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-22 20:41:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7453240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mara gets glow-in-the-dark not-stars stuck in her hair and maybe learns a little something about the meaning of <em>home</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like odysseus at the prow of his ship

**Author's Note:**

> this is a compilation of a patchwork of _ancient_ bits and pieces of writing i'd done, but essentially a fill-in-the-blanks for "and the stars glow for you" (the OG nursery verse fic)
> 
> ANYHOOPS, I actually rather quite love and adore it, so feedback would be DELIGHTFUL. Also, the title and all the sections are from Florence + The Machine, and this is a bit of a different style I'm using, so hopefully!!! it works!!! peace and blessings, friends

**i. the horses are comin’ (jade)**

Luke is lifting a plastisteel plank up the Falcon’s ramp when Mara finally makes the decision, with unshakeable resolve, to talk to him without subjecting herself to awkward silences.

“That’s cheating, Skywalker.”

He doesn’t take his eyes off the plank. “I’m practicing.”

“It’s still cheating.”

“You know,” he says, looking incredibly serious, “just because I’m not physically using my arms doesn’t mean I’m not using up energy. Focusing on an object like this takes up even more mental energy than you’d –”

“If you’re going to start sermoning me, I’m leaving,” she interrupts, scowling (only slightly) and crossing her arms. “And you should exercise those arms of yours too, you know.”

“Hey,” says Luke, turning away from his plank and dropping it gently to the floor. “I’ll have you know I have very nice arms.” A pause. “And ‘sermoning’ isn’t a word.”

“Mine are nicer,” she says, and can’t help but grin at his exaggeratedly affronted look. “And it definitely is. Do you spend all your time doing Jedi stuff?”

He doesn’t answer her directly, but pulls himself up onto the docking clamps holding the Falcon in place and motions for her to sit down next to him.

(She doesn’t.)

“You’re still here,” he observes finally, and she feels her fists clench impulsively under her arms.

“Yes.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then smiles.

“I’m glad.”

Mara’s eyebrows shoot up, her shoulders even tenser than they were a moment before. “You’re _glad?_ ”

“I’m serious,” he says. “You always make sure my ego’s in check. This way I don’t have to worry about being responsible for my own pig-headedness.”

She hates that it takes her a moment to realize that he’s teasing, the light dancing in his blue eyes far too friendly for her liking.

“Well, it’s a tough job,” she bites out. “Seeing as how your ego’s so big, you know.”

(And _that’s_ the biggest lie she’s ever told, but that’s also not the point.)

(Mara doesn’t quite know _what_ the point is.)

“Ouch,” says Luke, but there’s still a smile playing around his lips. “Why do I get the impression the insults are weakening with time?”

“Skywalker. You really wanna do this.”

Luke shrugs, pats the docking clamps beside him again.

“Not really. I’d rather you not insult me at all, actually.”

She pointedly ignores his clamp-patting.

“Tough.”

“That’s why I don’t complain,” he says, and she raises an eyebrow.

“Two minutes ago wasn’t complaining?”

“That was stating of fact.”

“Why are you always so nice to me?”

(And it’s shot out of her mouth before she realizes that it was even forming on her tongue, louder to her ears than a thousand roaring speeder engines and she feels the tenseness in her shoulders migrate down to the small of her back and her forearms and legs and everywhere, sees him slip from polite teasing to something far more serious.)

(She’s almost afraid that she’s blown it, that they can never go back.)

(They can’t, but he’s _Luke_ , so that makes things easier.)

“Come and give me a hand moving the plank,” he says, as if she didn’t say anything, and hops off the ledge. “It really is good practice.”

**ii. you wanna hold my hand (skywalker)**

Luke doesn’t think Mara’s looked quite this uncomfortable since that first day she showed up, shoulders stiff and stumbling over her reasons for being there.

( _I was, uh, just in the neighborhood and I thought –_ )

“Mara,” he says, pressing a hand against the hatchway frame as he passes by, “ _relax_.”

“I am relaxed,” she grinds out through clenched teeth, and he can see the muscles of her legs tighten through the fabric of her pants where Jaina is perched.

“Seriously,” he says. “Leia wouldn’t have given her to you if she didn’t trust you.”

“Get out of my head, Skywalker.”

Luke sighs, his fingers curling against the door frame.

“I’m not in your head,” he tells her. “I’m looking at your face.”

“Well, don’t.”

“Mara,” he starts, but she’s already turned her attention to the baby on her lap, currently occupied with plucking at the buttons on Mara’s tunic.

“Hands to yourself, kid,” she tells Jaina, prying the small fingers from the general vicinity of her breasts.

“You’ve done this before,” Luke tries instead, taking his hand off the door frame completely. “You did fine with Jacen.”

Her shoulders tense again, and she doesn’t look up from Jaina’s hands (which are now busy examining Mara’s fingers), but she does say, “At least her brother had the decency to call me pretty first,” the joke rolling with only a small amount of difficulty off her tongue and into the readily waiting tense atmosphere.

Luke feels himself grin in relief.

“Leia says Jaya’s inherited the scoundrel genes.”

Mara snorts and doesn’t answer, watching as Jaina says something that sounds like “mam froo weddy” and peruses the nail on her index finger.

“Anyway,” says Luke, “I’ll leave you to it.”

(She doesn’t look up until after he’s gone, biting her lip and telling herself that she’s not letting Jaina put the finger into her mouth because it’s disgusting, not because she’s worried the crazy kid’ll ingest the residual engine grease and coolant fluid that are still staining her hands.)

**iii. cause i’m gonna be free and i’m gonna be fine (organa)**

Mara is in the captain’s cabin with Leia when the uniform falls out of the drawer, and Leia can practically hear her internal monologue as she watches the younger woman out of the corner of her eye, sanding the edges of the crib finally welded properly to the wall.

Leia doesn’t know if Mara really is only pretending that she came back for no other reason than because she likes watching Luke struggle pitifully with his errant niece and nephew. Of course, the promise of free food is likely also encouraging her to stay, Leia thinks, which all things considered really isn’t a particularly bad set of reasons – watching Luke struggle with infants is, admittedly, very entertaining, and free food is always a blessing when you’ve spent even a small portion of your life hunting for scraps or living off ration bars –

But, still. 

_till_.

There’s an easy rhythm that the younger woman’s fallen into, an hour into their cleaning out of the cabin in relatively mutual silence, that belies something – _more_.

Leia’s spent the past week and a half watching as Mara flits in and out of their chaotic work routine. She’s taken drooling babies from her stiff, freckled arms, her lips curling against her will when Jaya reaches back for her, cooing (“the twins like her,” Luke tells Leia once, ducking under a transparisteel beam to help her hoist a box, and Leia wonders at the ease with which she accepts this as suitable proof for Mara’s goodness, however latent). They’ve sneezed their way through ancient storage boxes with each other, and Leia’s told her that awful vulgar joke about the Biss and the Wampa over Han’s leftover curry. And, ignoring Mara’s vehement protest, helped her extract misshapen glow-in-the-dark stars from her mane of red hair.

(Mara is a conundrum that Leia has a difficult time taking apart, much as she pretends to read her perfectly. Luke and Han seem to understand Mara in a way Leia herself has difficulty with – something about her that Leia feels is important to both of them. Something that extends further than themselves, into the future in a way effortless only due to their tangled past.)

Mara had called her by her first name sometime earlier that morning, and Leia had smiled: she is tall and lithe and more emotionally guarded than Leia could ever hope to be, once upon a time standing against everything that Leia is ( _was, will be_ ). But –

(Leia prides herself on reading people well, has done from a very young age, and Force help her but she _likes_ Mara.)

They’re digging around in the drawers built into the wall, pulling out various trinkets and articles of clothing and tossing them into a synthplast box at her knees. It’s an exercise they’ve been working at all morning, Leia claiming that if they’re planning on expanding the cabin, they can’t very well have personal belongings stuffed into the wall they’re about to pull down, can they?

(“You just like digging through my old stuff,” Han tells her, leaning against the door and looking far too distracting for an idiot with engine grease smearing his nose and baby drool staining the shoulder of his undershirt. Leia flicks dust at him and tells him to go back to taking apart his other wife, and she thinks Mara chokes a little bit behind her, which makes it all the more worth it; she _likes_ Mara, which means there’s a far higher likelihood that she’ll say something completely vulgar and un-princess-like in front of her that would likely have once upon a time made her Aunts faint dead away.)

(Oddly, Leia feels as though there is nothing more right to do around Mara than to behave as though she’s always been there, in a way.)

Leia stopped watching Mara from the corner of her eye sometime around noon – no longer possessing the energy to be at all inquisitive to the point of prying (Luke’s words, not hers, and Leia can’t help but think that of the two of them he’s more inclined to that sort of disgraceful behavior) – busy with her arms up to her elbows in their old, dusty possessions.

The fabric in front of her is rough and starched and still as neatly folded as the first time she stumbled upon it, nearly six years previous.

She pulls it out, and Mara stills so abruptly on the opposite side of the room that Leia thinks it would be difficult not to notice her reaction.

Leia says, “Huh, I’d forgotten this was in here,” muttered under her breath, and slips the neatly folded Imperial uniform back into the drawer, lightly slapping her hands against her knees as she gets up with a soft groan and leans out of the hatchway into the hall leading down to the galley. Mara stares at the spot where the uniform disappeared into the wall and Leia purses her lips, leans forward against the balls of her feet and calls her husband’s name.

“What!”

(His voice yells back, muffled from across the ship. Mara had actually asked Leia, the second time she spent the day on their ship, about the effectiveness of hollering from one side of a rusty freighter to the other. Leia had said, “well, it’s not particularly, but we manage,” and couldn’t help but feel Mara categorize it as another of those quintessential “Skywalker and Family” things and catalogue it in the back of her mind, almost out of habit.)

“Do you want to come and help out with this?”

“ _What?_ ”

“Cleaning the drawers!”

“What drawers?”

“The cabin drawer!”

“The cabin - my hands are a little tied here, sweetheart!”

(And later Leia will learn that he means this quite literally, the malleable plastisheets they’re planning on using to cover the renovated space somehow having gotten tangled on its way out of the box and into his arms.)

“ _That_ cabin drawer!”

“Wha –”

“Will you just _come?_ ”

She can feel Mara’s eyes on her, and so she turns and opens another cabinet, humming a familiar spacer shanty under her breath to which she’s forgotten the words, picking a few shirts from the back and folding them casually. Han might show up within the next minute or the next hour, and she’s come to learn that becoming attached to the exact timing of his extracting himself from Ship Repair and Maintenance is usually counterproductive for one’s married life and general health.

Mara’s still staring at her. Or rather, at the uniform in the drawer.

Han’s head pokes through the hatchway and Leia waves towards the half-open drawer, and her husband says, “What’re you talking ab –” almost immediately before closing his mouth again and frowning.

“Oh,” he says. “Right.”

“I didn’t want to put it with the other stuff,” says Leia, watching the expression on his face carefully. “In case you didn’t want – or, you know, I wasn’t sure what you thought.”

Han scratches absently at the back of his neck and exhales, maybe two seconds before noticing Mara’s presence in the room.

Leia can’t say she doesn’t take pride in the fact that she knows him well enough to expect the bordering-on-casual, “Hey, Mara,” before he pulls them out of the drawer again and rolls them up in his hands, tossing them into the box with the other things.

Leia sits back on her haunches and looks up at her husband.

“You’re sure?”

“Eh,” and he shrugs, tosses Mara what is probably a lazy, one fingered salute before ducking out of the doorway again in response to the words, _“Solo, your kids are trying to eat my ear!”_ echoing down the hall in what could only be Luke’s mock-exasperated tones.

Leia tries to hide her smile.

“He –” starts Mara, and Leia plucks what is unmistakably an old, dingy hair brush from the closet.

“I’d like to say this isn’t mine,” Leia says with a sigh, wrinkling her nose, “but it definitely is. Yes, long before he met us. And I can help you with the railing now, if you’d like.”

“I think I can manage,” says Mara. She tucks a wayward lock of hair behind her ear, the action reflexive in its abruptness.

“Mmm,” says Leia, picking up the box and walking to the doorway.

“Sorry,” Mara blurts, and Leia turns around, curious, to look at her. Her hips feel weighed down, the hem of her shirt tugged over the swell of her belly, but the box nestles comfortably against her leg and Leia leans back against the doorway. “I mean, I didn’t mean to be –”

“In the room?” Leia’s eyebrow is raised almost in amusement. “It’s fine, Mara.”

She can see Mara’s fingers curl defensively at her sides and bites the inside of her lip to stop her amusement from growing. “I intruded on something I wasn’t supposed to know.”

Leia’s lips purse imperceptibly (effective for smothering smiles, she knows). “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“He – I didn’t know,” she finishes, somewhat lamely, Leia thinks, something that sounds out-of-character for the always cool and always dignified Mara Jade, playing hot and cold and equally dangerous as both.

“It’s public record,” says Leia, and the amusement starts to bleed out of her voice despite herself. “Well, sort of. On the files. If you still want to apologize, apologize to him, not me. And I figured you’d have had Ghent look us all up in your time at the Palace.”

Mara stares at her.

“I never thought it was necessary?”

Leia grins, finally – something shifts and it’s alright to do so, she thinks – and balances the box on one hip. She tugs a worn rag out of her back pocket to wipe the dust off her hands and thinks about her own reaction, the first time she’d seen the uniform.

(A whole month alone in a tin can in space.)

“That’s awfully nice of you. I looked up his file the moment I stepped foot off the Falcon’s ramp after the Death Star.”

She’s still grinning cheerfully when she heaves the box a little higher on her hip and walks out of the room.

The sound of Mara’s sanding, renewed in its vigor to the point where Leia can hear it all the way down the hallway, follows her as she walks away. She passes Han, who is now sporting a handprint of dust on his shirt and who offers her a lopsided smile.

“You two almost done?”

“You should talk to her sometime,” says Leia, and she rises up on her toes to press a soft kiss to his mouth. Han raises an eyebrow at her, rumpled and gentle and only very barely questioning.

“Mara, huh.”

Leia feels her grin grow, and she lets her hip bump against his as she continues down the ship’s hall.

**iv: happiness, like a train on a track (karrde)**

He hears the distinct gait of her boots against the walkway leading up to his ship before she actually enters the hatchway, and the smile she’s given is a genuine one.

“Mara Jade. I haven’t seen you in nearly a month.”

“Hey, Karrde,” she says, offering him a grin in return. Her eyes flit around the cabin space quickly, calculatingly, before settling on his face.

Old habits, he supposes, die hard.

“You cut your hair,” he comments, eyeing way the shorn locks poke out behind her ears. She shrugs and slings her bag off of her shoulder.

“It felt like the right time for a change.”

“The business with Harkness went well, then?” he says without commenting further, (because prying is something he does extraordinarily well, but somehow he feels as though he already half-knows the answer) and offers her a seat, leaning back in his chair and smiling.

“Smashingly,” says Mara, dropping her bag onto the floor with a heavy clunk and crossing her arms. Her flat tone is countered by the small quirk of her lips. “Come on, Karrde. You totally heard about this.”

“What, that they nearly jettisoned you out of airlock?”

“That they nearly jettisoned themselves out of airlock,” Mara corrects him, flicking a strand of her brilliant hair, fallen out from its place tucked behind the piercings in her ear, out of her face. “No one jettisons _me_ out of airlocks.”

“Oh, no,” he says seriously. “They wouldn’t have the nerve.”

She narrows her eyes, but her response is only a simple, “damn straight they wouldn’t,” before seating herself across from him in the lounge chair.

“So,” she says, “how’re things this side of the law?”

“The fact that you’re on your way to becoming semi-respectable as a branch-off of _my_ organization does nothing to diminish your affinity for smuggling,” he replies, reaching to uncork the bottle sitting on the table between them.

“Come off it, Karrde. Like hell I’m _respectable_.”

“Oh? What was that ‘this side of the law’ thing, then?”

She smirks. “I was talking about you.”

“ _Me?_ ”

“How many times’ve you helped the New Republic out in the past week, Captain?”

He raises an eyebrow.

“I find it very interesting that you can go around pointing fingers like that when you’re the one who got me caught up in this whole enterprise in the first place.” His pointed glance at the (rarely used, he guesses, but present nonetheless) lightsaber at her belt doesn’t go missed. “And,” he adds, “they pay me.”

In a fit of uncharacteristic affability, Mara only shrugs.

“You’re the one who stopped me from killing him.”

“My dear Mara, I don’t think I stopped you from doing anything.”

He’s teasing – she knows he is – but it’s also true, thrown sharply and abruptly into relief. Mara ignores this and accepts the glass of wine without remark. Mostly.

“Wine in the morning, huh?”

“Special occasion. I rarely see you anymore, what with your pseudo-respectability and all.”

“Oh, stick it.”

“And good health to you too, Jade,” he says, and lifts his glass. She grins despite herself, sips from the glass. He sighs, tapping his own glass with his fingers, and says, “You’re preoccupied.”

Mara glances up from her perusal of the lounge table and purses her lips. “I am not.”

“Really, Mara. I’ve known you for years.”

“Is thinking a crime?” she snaps, some of the familiar bite creeping into her tone, and Karrde feels a bemused smile play at his lips.

“Certainly not. Though, I suppose it depends on what you’re thinking about.”

She frowns, twirls the wine glass between her fingertips. The light of the cabin makes her cropped hair seem darker; less surreal, the once-golden hoops lining her right ear worn and tarnished. And he notes with a fleeting moment of surprise that in spite of her tense expression, the hard edges of her face (so fierce and imposing and impassive, closed off to anyone who didn’t know her and terrifying to anyone who dared cross her, he remembers) have softened.

(It really _has_ been too long.)

“Did you hear about the Billibringi conflict?” says Mara at last, in that sudden, sharp way of hers that always makes Karrde more curious than is probably good for him.

“The one on the edge of the Core?” He scratches at his beard for a moment before _hmmming_ and saying, “They sent Councilor Organa-Solo to deal with that one, didn’t they? Though I’ve been told there was – ah – considerable controversy over that decision.” Mara frowns and flicks at her glass, and Karrde raises an eyebrow. “But I’m sure you already knew that.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I heard.”

“And she’s –”

“Pregnant,” says Mara, brushing a strand of her hair out of her face, the tenseness in her shoulders still present. “Almost five months, yeah.”

“That far along?” he says. “Hmm, I didn’t know that. Well, I suppose if anyone could handle Billibringi while five months pregnant, it’d be her. I was talking to Solo just the other day, actually –”

“Let me guess,” starts Mara wryly, but Karrde interrupts her with an arched eyebrow.

“I don’t know about you, but I’ll freely admit that were _my_ pregnant wife where she is now, I’d be even less pleased than he is.” He takes a sip of his drink. “I wonder if Skywalker’s with her.”

“He’s not.”

“Oh?”

Mara makes a face that is probably intended as a casual smile but looks more like a grimace, and Karrde pauses for a moment before speaking again.

“You know more about this than I do,” he realizes.

“It’s bad,” says Mara shortly, and all traces of attempted easiness gone (and doesn’t bother explaining how she knows so decisively that Luke Skywalker is not, in fact, with his sister). “What I heard, things are really tense. I’ve no idea what that damn fool Republic of theirs is doing, sending a – sending her into the middle of a conflict, but it’s not going to help shite – not from where I’m standing, anyway.”

“They’re getting desperate, I think,” says Karrde, watching her carefully. “The Imperial remnant still hasn’t given up, and the Billibringi on the New Republic’s side would be an indispensible asset, wouldn’t they.”

Mara mutters something under her breath and scowls, and Karrde stops in the middle of taking another sip of his drink.

“You’re worried,” he observes.

“ _No_ ,” snaps Mara, shoulders tensing even further. “I just – I dunno. It’s stupid. If something happened, it’d be stupid.”

He inclines his head, scratches his beard again.

(And thinks that of all the people in the galaxy to cause the newer, softer angles in Mara’s face, Luke Skywalker and his family would have been his last guess.)

(But then, Mara has always been unpredictable.)

“I’ve been thinking of getting Ghent to do some digging,” he says, casually, after a moment, and downs the rest of his wine. “Keep some tabs.”

“Karrde –”

“Bloody time I got a foot in this one. And of course, some leverage against the Billibringi wouldn’t go amiss.” His eyes twinkle. “Ackbar may be a paragon of stoicism, Mara, but even he’ll pay for the right information. Don’t you think?”

She watches him carefully, fully aware of the favor being offered. Though, he thinks, he’s not lying when he says he’d have done it anyway.

“Always on the lookout for a business opportunity, eh Karrde?” she says finally, and he grins.

“Well, I _am_ willing to take some credit for you new-found respectability. Not all, mind you. But some.”

She smiles, small and genuine, and asks him about the latest galactic credit rate. He doesn’t bother to question the way her shoulders have relaxed, if only minimally, and offers her another glass of wine.

(And the thing is, he’s always saying that Mara ought to have some friends, isn’t he?)

It’s on her way out the Wild Karrde that she stops and says, “Thanks for the wine, Karrde,” and he smiles back.

“You’re welcome back anytime, you know.”

“I’m respectable now,” she reminds him, tossing him a wink.

“Mara –” She turns, eyebrows raised. “I heard Calrissian is back on-planet,” he says. “I’m sure he’d love to talk to you.”

She narrows her green eyes, momentarily, before gripping the handle of her bag more tightly and tossing her shorn hair out of her face; she’s never been impractical, and it shocks him that she’d have ever opted for something so obviously so.

“He’ll try to scam me out of credits,” she says. “And I’ve got places to be.”

(But the tenseness in her shoulders has dissipated almost entirely.)

**v: like the stars chase the sun (skywalker, again)**

Later he’ll claim that she snuck up behind him, surprised him, he really wasn’t expecting it, at all, and no my reaction was not even close to “hyper-raptured fool”, Han, and Force’s sake but _you weren’t even there anyway so you can just –_

Her hair is gone.

Well. Less. Where it used to hang down her back and brush against her elbows, it’s been cropped, the bright strands tucked awkwardly behind her ears and tickling her neck. Luke tries his damndest not to stare.

“Take a holo, Skywalker,” she says, raising an eyebrow. “It’ll last you a helluva lot longer.”

He grins, then, smile spreading easy across his face, because, well: she’s still Mara.

Though, defying all reason, he’s run into her in a busy docking bay in Fusst and her hair is all cut off.

He doesn’t mention that it’s nice, or that despite that he liked it better long, or ask why she cut it (because they’re friends, yes, and he values her opinion – probably more than she values his, he tells himself, the former being an outright lie – but his opinion on her hair is really neither here nor there. So.) But she pauses a moment, glances at his grin and says,

“I just – needed a change. I guess.”

The grin stays there and he reaches back to toss his bag into the cockpit, where it lands in a heap by the controls.

“It’s nice. I didn’t expect to see you here, though.”

The eyebrow climbs higher. “I’m here on business,” she tells him, arms crossing in front of her. “You, on the other hand …”

“I’m here on business,” Luke parrots, hopping down from his perch on the side of the X-wing and grinning even more widely. “Or I was. Though, I’m wondering whether my time wouldn’t have been spent more wisely elsewhere.”

“Shoddy time of it, huh?”

“Didn’t find what I came for,” Luke says, smile fading slightly. “But I suppose I ought to be used to that, by now.”

“Ah,” says Mara, snapping her fingers. “Jedi stuff.”

Luke sighs. “There needs to be a – an official thing, you know? And I need to find a way to find other Force sensitives, because I know they’re out there –” He doesn’t say it, but it’s there, uncoiling in the air between them: _I know they’re out there now that I discovered you exist_. “Anyway. I want to rebuild the Order, but – doing it in the old temple seems – _wrong_ – somehow.”

“You’re rebuilding the temple?” The surprise is evident on her face. He wonders briefly why it’s even there in the first place before recognizing the little twinge in his chest as disappointment – he is disappointed that she seems surprised.

(But the lightsaber’s still hanging at her belt, so there’s that.)

“Not exactly,” says Luke slowly. “Just. The whole thing two years ago – C’baoth wanted the twins. He was going to – to –”

“Brainwash them,” Mara supplies blandly, and Luke’s smile has vanished completely, now.

“The more I think about it – it’s my responsibility to help them, isn’t it? To – make sure. That they know what to do with their abilities and if someone like C’baoth shows up again. Well.”

Mara crosses her arms and leans against the hull of the X-wing with him, bites her lip.

“You want to extend that favor to anyone else who wants a chance, too.”

The “why am I not surprised” that would have been muttered only half-amusedly under her breath is implied, and Luke suppresses a sheepish smile.

“I don’t know,” he says, sighing. “Certainly, with someone like y –” (he catches himself gracefully) “– like Leia. She’s very strong in the Force, and I’d be happy to train her – or at least, teach her what I know – If she wanted. But half the time I feel like I’m not qualified enough and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, and anyway, Leia doesn’t want to – she doesn’t have the time to commit to it, not properly, so it’s more just a general be-there-to-drop-out-of-the-sky-and-offer-kernels-of-wisdom thing.” He laughs, small and short. The side of the X-wing is digging into his shoulder almost painfully. He has some vague idea that he’s blabbering, but he’s had no one around to talk to for the past month aside from the few comm. calls to Coruscant and even if Leia wasn’t busy with the NR and the twins, she couldn’t really –

“So much of what Yoda told me seems – _off_ ,” he finds himself saying, the words jumping out of his mouth and his fingers tap a rhythm nervously on the durasteel side of the starship; a ridiculously childish thing for a Jedi Master to do. “Sort of? And I don’t know if I’m even – if I can even say that. What if he actually was right, and I’m being immature? But then, I don’t know that either.”

Mara’s staring at him, a lock of her shorn hair slipping out from behind her ear and flopping in her face.

“Stang,” she says. “You don’t talk much, do you?”

Luke feels his face heat up.

“Sorry. You probably don’t – care. About this. What kind of business did you say you’re here on?”

But Mara scoffs almost immediately, gives him a look that he’s come to interpret as some variation of _you’re the biggest dumbass I know_ and says, “Come off it, Skywalker. I actually stood and listened to you, didn’t I?”

Luke mirrors her crossed arms.

“You’re always telling me to shut up about the Jedi stuff.”

“I asked you to give me my space,” she says, looking vaguely uncomfortable (like she, too, is wondering where this conversation is coming from and why are they actually standing there having it and – just – what?) “And you respect that. Mostly. You need sort your thoughts out, go ahead.”

Luke stares.

(The question of _are they friends_ has come up enough times for him to toss it aside like a used sock by now, because the word ‘friend’ isn’t quite what he’ll use and she’s always fighting back tooth and nail and he’s never really thought about it, but it’s nice, having another person who’s got the same – _thing_ – same abilities and is he just insanely lonely or did Mara just verbalize the fact that she considers him a friend without actually saying anything?)

“Right.”

“Doesn’t mean I care, though,” she reminds him, lifting her chin slightly and narrowing her eyes. “To me it’s all bantha shit. You either do it or you don’t, and either way it’s a hell of a lot better than waiting for some maniac like C’baoth to show up.”

Her eyes are hard, guarded – and he can almost feel her suppressing a shudder at the memory of being controlled, and he realizes that if anyone knows what it’s like to second guess everything you Know it’s her.

“You’re saying I should teach them.”

“I’m saying that you got what you needed to say off your chest and I don’t give a flying gundark’s ass so can we talk about something else?”

“That I should rebuild the temple.”

“Skywalker, what part of ‘I have fulfilled my socially-dictated responsibility as your acquaintance and no longer want to talk to you’ did you not understand?”

Luke feels his smile grow, curling up against his cheeks, and he exhales. It quite suddenly feels as though he’s stopped holding his breath, though he’d never thought he was before. He wonders how many of his limbs she’ll break if he says anything so sentimental as _I missed you, Jade_.

Mara glares at him, her brilliant hair curling around her jaw where it’s slipped back out from behind her ear.

Luke says, “Your new hair’s nice,” and Mara actually groans.

“Force help me, Skywalker – and, look at this. You’ve made me start swearing by the Force.”

“That,” says Luke, “is not my fault.”

She looks at him, thick eyebrow arching. And then,

“A balance,” she says. “You need a balance between the two. Take the good and leave the bad.”

Luke blinks.

“That’s what this whole business is about, isn’t it?” she says, and the roll of her eyes is less irritated than she probably means it to be.

( _Friendship._ )

Luke grins, and he thinks that there’s almost a spark of a laugh in Mara’s Force presence, two seconds before she punches him in the arm and walks away without so much of a second glance, the bright shock of her hair disappearing in the crowds.

**vi. you want a revelation, some kind of resolution (jade – firsts and lasts can happen at once, after all)**

“You kriffing bastard,” says Mara, without any preamble whatsoever. “Get off my ship.”

Vader’s ghost crosses his arms and arches an eyebrow, looking disconcertingly young and cheerful and unfamiliar and Mara sort of hates him.

He looks like Luke.

(No – no he doesn’t. Not where it counts. There’s a harshness –)

“I’m not here to apologize,” he says, and Mara forces her hands to unfurl, where she’d balled them into fists the first half-second after she came into her galley in the middle of the night on a smuggling run and turned to face the blue-lit figure.

“Of course not,” she snaps, and it’s all she can do not to let her voice betray her. He sighs anyway, tilting his head to the side.

“You made it,” he says. “You got out.” A pause. “He’s – he’s amazingly stubborn, that one.”

(He _doesn’t_ look like Luke, she repeats, to herself.)

“He just cares,” she finds herself snapping before she even realizes that Vader had meant it as a compliment. Her fingers dig into her cargo pants, and she tries to stand a little taller. And – well. She wonders how she ever found a friend who cares like – she wonders how she found a _friend_.

Vader is silent for a long moment, long enough for Mara to feel her entire body go stiff, angry, like maybe if she wills him out of her ship, he’ll go.

As if reading her thoughts (bloody ghosts), he says,

“It’s not like I _want_ to be here.” A tilt of the head, eyes on the weapon that’s resting against her hip, and when did she start carrying it around with her everywhere – “That lightsaber’s one of a kind, kid. It’s amazingly light-gripped.”

She’s not sure what possesses her to snap out her next words – perhaps the easy posture, or the dancing amusement around his lips that makes him look far too much at home in the _Jade’s Fire_ , her sweat and blood and hard work and a step forward and now he’s back here, too much of a gods damned reminder –

“There’s only _one_ person,” snarls Mara, “who calls me _kid_ without getting himself impa –”

“My infuriating son-in-law,” says Vader, “yes, I know. And your reason for not impaling him is likely that Leia would be up in arms, though I must say I am grateful for your abstaining from maiming any of my family members.”

This, delivered blithely, too matter-of-fact for it to be a taunt, and yet a taunt all the same. His eyes are blue and bright and more intense than his son’s, and Mara wonders if in another life, they wouldn’t have sort of gotten along. He taps his glove-covered fingers against the table he’s sitting on.

“Try not to mess it up,” he tells her simply.

“You’re one to talk,” she finds herself saying, all the bitterness and fear of her fifteen-year-old-self licking the underbelly of her words.

“I like the new hair, Jade.”

(Mara wonders later if this wasn’t a substitute for the guilt-heavy _I know_ of his fading smile.)

“Kriff off,” she tells him, and he grins.

(She doesn’t. Doesn’t want to mess – has no intention of –)

“I know he cares,” says Vader’s ghost, and his voice is suddenly very soft. “It’s more than I – but you deserve it. You deserve someone who cares.”

(She won’t tell this to Luke, but then – well. She doesn’t feel so odd about carrying the lightsaber everywhere anymore, either.)

She blinks and he’s gone. Mara kicks her galley cupboard, once, and grabs her comm., and when he answers, she opens with,

“So have you found a place to start training people, then?”

The flickering blue holo blinks a few times before smiling at her, big and warm and familiar.

“Nah,” says Luke, rubbing at his eyes. She wonders if she’s woken him up, committed a cardinal mistake and forgotten time differences. “It’s a work in progress. Leia’s had her baby, though – you ought to come and visit.”

“Yeah,” says Mara (and gods, but she really, really means it). “Yeah, I – on my way back, I’ll. Alright.”

Luke grins at her, and Force help her, she grins back.


End file.
